Battle of the Blades

When manufacturing company Group Dekko needed to upgrade its storage and server infrastructure, it faced a problem common among most customers--it needed higher levels of performance with systems that consume less power and require minimal real estate.

Group Dekko's longtime solution provider, San Antonio-based Sirius Computer Solutions, had an answer: IBM's BladeCenter platform.

The customer replaced its xSeries tower-based servers with the innovative solution and used IBM's new Server Connectivity Module for BladeCenter to create an iSCSI-based virtual storage environment through its OS/400-based iSeries systems.

"It really fit the bill quite well," says Chris Edwards, vice president of systems at the Kendallville, Ind.-based company with about 1,500 employees. "Obviously blades are the way it's going."

Edwards says he was able to consolidate several servers into one blade architecture, which requires less power and space than the systems it replaced. He already looks forward to one day putting his company's iSeries servers, which run mission-critical applications such as Lotus Domino, into the blade environment.

Group Dekko is just one example of midsize enterprises giving blade centers a shot. Jack Novia, managing director and senior vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Technology Systems Group for the Americas, says blades have ascended from a niche technology three years ago to a key factor in today's data-center consolidation.

"The market now sees blades as a great opportunity," Novia says. "Most of our customers who have looked at consolidation and virtualization are thinking about blade technology and using that as the platform to shrink the data center."

Indeed, shipments should grow about 50 percent from 2005 to 2006, says Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt. While 548,000 blade servers shipped in 2005, yielding $2 billion in sales, Hewitt forecasts that $3.2 billion worth of blades--up to nearly 800,000 units--could move this year.

The Buzz Around Blades

But even with all the hype surrounding blades, Gartner predicts that those will account for only about 19 percent of the overall server market within the next few years. Hewitt says 1U, 2U and 4U servers will comprise the lion's share.

"Blades are going to grow at a good solid rate, but in the context of all servers, you're not looking at something that will overtake the market," Hewitt says. Just as the functionality of notebook PCs was far more limited than that of their desktop cousins--at least for a while--blade servers don't offer all that big-form-factor systems do. Also, blades command a price premium.

NEXT: Another big issue -- lack of standards.

And then there are other issues that could limit the true growth potential of blade servers--the most notable among them, a lack of standards. At this point, there's no evidence that the tier-one server OEMs--Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Sun--have any real desire for their blades to interoperate in multivendor environments.

But executives at IBM beg to differ. Big Blue is pushing its blade.org consortium, which boasts more than 70 members, including AMD, Intel and QLogic, toward interoperability, and has gotten a commitment from venture capital firm Walden International to provide $100 million in funding to companies that build technology around the BladeCenter. Meanwhile, IBM points out that there are others providing VC to the blade.org initiative as well. Tim Dougherty, director of IBM's BladeCenter business, says the purpose of blade.org is to build an ecosystem much like in the early days of the PC market, when standards brought commonality to the desktop.

"We are [creating] this large ecosystem of companies that are building components and solutions around blades," Dougherty says. "That's the whole purpose of blade.org."

Blade.org, though, lacks three key companies on its membership roster: Dell, HP and Sun. None of them have hinted at any plans to sign up. IBM's key rivals say the company is effectively trying to forge its own standards.

"I would say [blade.org and BladeCenters] are open like Windows is open," says Mike McNerney, director of blades marketing at Sun. "You can license the APIs to build I/O modules, but it's not open like Linux. It's really an attempt to create a de facto standard in the market."

Sun's re-entry into the blade market this month with the Sun Blade 8000 focuses on industry-standard components and rack-based systems such as PCI Express that are supported on the backplanes of all the major vendors' racks, says McNerney.

For its part, HP says it promotes standards that "make sense," such as those around management interfaces, says Paul Miller, HP's vice president of marketing for industry-standard servers and blade systems.

"Today IBM, HP, Dell and Sun all have unique chassis in the marketplace," Miller says. "A standards body takes time, it takes maturing in the marketplace. While IBM is standing up and saying they're the standard without any other system vendors signed to it, it's not a standard."

Miller points out that key network and storage interconnect vendors, such as Brocade Systems and Cisco, have already developed interfaces to HP's new c-Class blade family, launched last month. But Sun's McNerney argues that, because there's no common interface such as PCI Express, those vendors have to develop interconnects around the different vendors' proprietary blade offerings.

Chuck Smith, vice president of HP's enterprise server and storage group, says the value proposition for blades supersedes the issues around standards--at least for now. "There's a benefit from standards in terms of ubiquity, and similarity from an interchangeability perspective, but the flipside is that there's enough innovation in the power, design and backplane [so that] customers aren't pressing us for standards today."

Pick A Blade, Any Blade

For the foreseeable future, capturing market share appears to be the key battle among blade vendors. That means solution providers need to bear the brunt of the technology's limitations by steering customers in the right direction, or at least being prepared to find alternate ways of interconnecting proprietary systems.

Otherwise, solution providers can toe the vendors' line. For example, HP argues that its new c-Class servers can reduce both capital and operational costs by 46 percent in a typical data center, while reducing facilities costs--whether rent or electric--by up to 60 percent. The company's HP Thermal Logic Technologies and Active Cool Fan will deliver power savings of up to 40 percent over traditional rack-mounted servers, HP says.

But whatever the story may be, there are many chapters to come. There will be continual updates to these new blade architectures in the coming months, quarters and years. There will be new speeds and feeds, integration capabilities and a battle to bring some interoperability to the table.